[An
old road through the streets of El Bosque Municipality, in Chiapas, the
birthplace of Professor Alberto Patishtán Gómez. Photo: Moysés Zúñiga Santiago]

[Alberto
Patishtán Gómez during a medical review in the Hospital of Life, in September
2012. The indigenous professor is a prisoner in prison number 5 in San
Cristóbal de las Casas. Photo: Moysés Zúñiga
Santiago]

By: Hermann Bellinghausen

San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, March 22, 2013

The notoriety
gained by Alberto Patishtán Gómez’ struggle to attain his freedom has prevented
the crime that led to his personal misfortune of spending 12 years in prison
(and with 48 more still to serve, according to his sentence) from being
forgotten, which is certainly contrary to the wishes of many authorities, at
least the state ones, from 2000 to the present, including four governors,
literally from every party. What happened on the morning of June 12, 2000 in
Las Lagunas de Las Limas, Simojovel? What could be the motive of the perpetrators?
What was going on there in those days?

The murder
of seven police –the state commander Francisco Pérez Morales, five officers
under his command, and the El Bosque municipal commander, Alejandro Pérez Cruz
- represented an act of enormous gravity. Today perhaps we have become
accustomed to that level of news, but back then, even for the militarized and
para-militarized Chiapas, it was extraordinary. It of course occupied all the
newspaper headlines the next day.

Three
weeks later, the elections would be held in which the PRI would lose the
Presidency, and in August the governorship. President Ernesto Zedillo,
historically and personally involved with the development of the war against
the indigenous of Chiapas, in general, and of those from El Bosque, in
particular, was ready to visit the state on Tuesday, the 13th, to
inaugurate a highway in the Lacandón Jungle, but suspended his tour. The PRI
candidate for governor, Sami David, did the same. The federal Army sent
hundreds of soldiers, occupied the place of the ambush, the municipal
headquarters, the roads, and immediately entered the Zapatista communities.
Nevertheless, the first hypothesis of the Secretary of National Defence was
that it could be dealing with “a cell of the Revolutionary Popular Army (EPR,
its initials in Spanish)” (La Jornada 13/06/2000), something that
surprised people because not then, nor ever, did it have a presence in the zone.

That same
day, the hypothesis of the Independent Centre of Farmworkers and Campesinos
(CIOAC) seemed more credible, due to their historic presence in the region:
they could be “paramilitaries from the Mira” (although with hindsight, the
paramilitary group in El Bosque, terrifying and lethal, was known as Los
Plátanos from the name of the community where they had settled, together
with judicial police: it was from here that they went out on June 10, 1998, to
participate in the massacre of Zapatistas
in Unión Progreso. This reporter was present in Los Plátanos, months before the
ambush, at a “burning for the media” of marijuana plants with the aim, which failed
in the end, of blaming the EZLN).

The
federal police initially talked about drug traffickers. The movement of
marijuana coming from Huitiupán was no secret.

The massacre
was on a Monday. The previous Saturday the Zapatistas had commemorated the
second anniversary of what happened in Unión Progreso and Chavajeval and the
incarceration of the autonomous authorities of San Juan de la Libertad. Diego
Cadenas, then a young lawyer with Frayba, stated to La Jornada on the
day of the ambush that that on June 10, when he was traveling to Unión Progreso
to participate in the religious acts for the second anniversary of the 1998 massacre,
at the military checkpoints at Puerto Caté and San Andrés Larráinzar the
soldiers told him that: “individual rights were suspended.” This was not the
case.

Two days
later, a commando force of between 10 and 15 individuals, with barricades
constructed and high-powered weapons, efficiently ambushed the dark green pick
up coming from Simojovel, in which eight police were traveling with the
official driver of the municipality of El Bosque, the younger son of the Mayor Manuel
Gómez Ruiz. Gravely injured, the young Rosemberg Gómez Pérez, who was driving
the vehicle with the two commanders in the cabin, and Belisario Gómez Pérez,
the Public Security agent who was in the back with his compañeros from the
(police) corporation, were left for dead by the attackers, and by surviving
became the only eyewitnesses.

La Jornada also
reported that this was “the eighth ambush” so far in the year 2000. The attacks
had already left 20 dead and an equal number injured. The policemen killed in Las Lagunas were Francisco Escobar Sánchez,
Rodolfo Gómez Domínguez, Guadalupe Margarito Rodríguez Félix, Arbey Vázquez
Gómez and Francisco Pérez Mendoza. Two of them are still remembered today
by cement crosses at the bend where they were riddled with bullets. 85 bullets
from AK-47 and R-15 rifles were counted.

The EZLN distances itself and investigates

The day
following the ambush, the Clandestine Indigenous Revolutionary Committee, General
Command of the EZLN declared in a brief communiqué: “According to information, the
attack was carried out using the tactics of drug traffickers, paramilitaries or
the military. The use of the so-called ‘coup de grâce’ is recurrent in these
armed groups. The attack took place in an area saturated with government troops
(Army and police), where it would have been very difficult to mobilize an armed
group without being detected and without the complicity of the authorities. The
attacking group had inside information about movements and the number of people
ambushed. This information could only be obtained by people from the government
or close to it.”

The rebel
commanders pointed out: “The EZLN is investigating to clarify the identity and
motive of the attacking group. Everything points to those who carried out the
attack being from the government (or under governmental auspices), since this
would give them a pretext for increasing the militarization of Chiapas, and for
justifying an attack on Zapatista communities or the EZLN. It is noteworthy
that this act reinforces the climate of instability, with which the official
candidate threatens [the state] if he doesn’t win.

“Open
provocation or not, the violent act is already an argument for increasing
military presence throughout the state, even in zones very far away from the
scene of the crime,” the communiqué adds (13/6/2000), detailing that: “in the
last three hours, the federal barracks at Guadalupe Tepeyac, in Las Margaritas;
Cuxuljá, in Ocosingo; Caté, in El Bosque, and the municipal headquarters of
Simojovel and El Bosque have been reinforced even more. Similarly, the number of
armed aircraft and flyovers has increased in the Highlands (Altos), Jungle
(selva) and Northern Zones.” And finally, “the EZLN disclaims itself from [responsibility
for] this act and calls on public opinion not to permit deceit.”

Patishtán’s capture

Nevertheless,
the state government of Roberto Albores Guillén, through their prosecutor,
Eduardo Montoya Liévano, immediately fostered the hypothesis that the attackers
could be Zapatistas, in alleged revenge for the massacre against them ordered
by the very same Albores Guillén two years before, although he also recognized
that they could be “robbers.” The convoy attacked, he said, was patrolling to
“combat gangsters.”

Senator
Carlos Payán Velver, a member of the Cocopa, proposed that the legislative
commission travel to the state, because the situation was “grave and critical.”
Deputy Gilberto López y Rivas, also a member of the Cocopa, pointed out that it
had the appearance of “a provocation from the paramilitaries who were set up by
the state government itself” (La Jornada 14/6/2000).

On the
same date, Víctor Manuel Pérez López, leader of the CIOAC, revealed that in
1997 the Chiapas government armed and financed “dissidents of the Labour Party (Partido
del Trabajo)” to fight the short-lived municipal government of this [Labour]
party and the CIOAC. “Everyone in the zone knows who they are,” he said, and: “once
the objective” of returning the municipal presidency to the PRI had been
fulfilled, they “dedicated themselves to robbery and drug trafficking.” They
act, he added, “with complete impunity, in broad daylight, even when the
military and police undertake frequent patrols.”

By then,
in two previous ambushes, four people had been murdered; according to the CIOAC,
they were “Zapatista bases.” On January 13, on the road to Chavajeval, heavily
armed masked men murdered Martín Sánchez Hernández, and later, on February 1,
Rodolfo Gómez Ruiz, Lorenzo Pérez Hernández and Martín Gómez, all of them Tzotziles.

Deputies
of the PRD and PAN accused the secretary of Government, Mario Lescieur
Talavera, of negligence, and said that the ambush would be used as a pretext
for the arrival of more members of the Federal Preventive Police. The tanks,
helicopters and the federal Army’s artillery had already arrived.

The
episode was ditched; damage control was urged. The government wanted to attain
it, so that President Zedillo could travel to Marqués de Comillas on June 19 to
inaugurate his highway. That same day, in the El Bosque municipal headquarters,
the Army and the PFP captured the teacher Alberto Patishtán Gómez, without
showing an arrest warrant. A group of residents, identified as PRI members,
“visibly emotional” (La Jornada, 20/6/2000), requested the state Congress’
intervention, maintaining that the detainee was innocent, “they distanced
themselves from the violent acts of June 12” and argued that they were not
armed nor did they belong to any paramilitary group. No attention was paid to
them, instead they were threatened.

Patishtán
was kept for one month illegally “under house arrest” in the Safari Hotel in
Tuxtla Gutiérrez. His family, friends and co-religionists occupied the town
hall and demanded the teacher’s release. Not even their own party backed them up.
And not only that, the then PRI deputy Ramiro Miceli Maza, friend of the mayor
(municipal president), and godfather of the young Rosemberg, turned out to be
key in intimidating and accusing the teacher and community leader, who ended up
imprisoned in Cerro Hueco Prison.

Also on
June 19, when giving his opinion on the imminent elections of July 3, 2000, Subcomandante
Marcos wrote: “Meanwhile, we are trembling here. And it’s not because
‘Croquetas’ Albores has contracted Alazraki so that ‘he lifts up’ his image
(probably Albores already looks for money in the promotion of dog food), not
for the six hundred thousand dollars that are going to be paid him (with money
originally allocated to ‘solve the conditions of poverty and marginalization of
indigenous Chiapanecos,’ Zedillo dixit). Neither is it because of the
barks from the ‘puppy’ Montoya Liévano (now he is more nervous because it is being
discovered that his ‘boys’ –in other words, his paramilitaries– were the ones
responsible for the attack on the Public Security (police) in El Bosque, last
June 12). No, we are trembling because we are soaked with rain. And it’s the
case that, between helicopters and storms, we can’t find a good roof.”

Now against the Zapatistas

The
following July 10, after the federal elections, one month after the ambush,
state police detained two EZLN support base residents of Unión Progreso in
Bochil, accusing them of participating in the crime. They did this even though
the Attorney General of the Republic maintained that the attackers had been a
group of PRI dissidents, among them Patishtán. These accusations crossed with
Mayor Manuel Gómez Pérez, who they had been attacking for months because of his
scandalous corruption.

The
State’s Attorney General of Justice (PGJE, its initials in Spanish) had his own
lines of investigation. “Resorting to the police posted in Los Plátanos, who
know about this, the authorities planted weak evidence of a crime on two
indigenous men from Unión Progreso” (La Jornada, 15/7/2000). One of them,
Salvador López González, was tortured and interrogated without a translator, he
signed an ad hoc confession and was incarcerated. In prison he met his
co-accused: Patishtán. Without even knowing each other, both were charged with
all the weight of the ambush.

La Jornada reported
from Unión Progreso: “The police detachment that detained the Zapatistas has
had the marijuana plants in Los Plátanos in sight for a long time. The internal
violence in that population centre, controlled by a known paramilitary group, has
always served as a pretext for accusing and attacking the neighbouring
Zapatistas. According to the representative from Unión Progreso, ‘they accuse
us of what they themselves do.’ The federal Army has entered Los Plátanos to
destroy these crops, the only ones detected in the area, on at least on two occasions,
although without detainees.”

Salvador
and his brother Manuel “were seized” on July 10. Their families stated: “The
Public Security (SP, its initials in Spanish) police beat them, took off their shoes
and clothes, and left Salvador unconscious.” With the detainees were a little
boy (“who cried a lot”) and a teenager, who “came to advise that they had taken
the compañeros away.”

As the
captors were not from Bochil, but rather from El Bosque, “they rented a jail for
a while.” The detainees were quickly sent to Cerro Hueco (state prison). “Those
from the SP put a handful of marijuana and a handful of bullets” on them and
they stole 28 boxes of soft drinks from them. Manuel would soon be released.

Exactly
one month before, on June 10, hours before the police killings, the SP
quartered in Los Plátanos intercepted a truck from Unión Progreso. The driver
was the same Salvador. “They interrogated him about a list of names. Since then
they wanted to blame the compañeros,” a representative of his community
declared: “We don’t know how many are on the list. At best, we are all
accused.” (Curiously, Patishtán’s fellow believers had expressed their
respective fear with almost the same words when he was detained).

With two
scapegoats as dissimilar as Alberto and Salvador, the case started to be “resolved,”
or at least forgotten by the national media.

English translation by the Chiapas Support
Committee for the: International Zapatista Translation Service, a collaboration
of the: Chiapas Support Committee, California, Wellington Zapatista Support
Group, UK Zapatista Solidarity Network